I recently set up Linux mint on my laptop. I'm more of a debian or gentoo fan and had never run Linux mint but I was looking for a combination of stability, easy access to video codecs, and something my wife is not terrified of.

For the most part it runs fairly well. but twice now in two days it has locked up with no explanation. This was under a very minor system load, I think firefox and transmission were the only things running. I had to hard both times.

I'm not really sure what log to check for this error. So far I haven't been able to find any discrepancies.

Any ideas?
Also, until this is is fixed I was thinking about setting all my drives to mount synchronously. what kind of performance hit am I going to take on a fairly modern system; core-i3 4, gb ram?

Arrrrg.... Happened again.

Strangely enough I don't loose control of the mouse. and background processes still appear to be running.
I think I'm going to enable sshd. maybe next time this happens I can get to a shell from another machine and figure out whats wrong. Or at least shut it down.

Does it happens randomly ?
Or does it happens only you use a certain application .
Just to be sure you can run a memory check

Totally random. If I could associate it with anything it would be Firefox. or possibly some music codec since I'm always playing Pandora in a browser.

Is the music still playing when it happens ?
Or did it also stops ?
Once I had more or less the same problem , but in my case the music was still playing and the rest was totally lock up
It turns out that the graphic card becomes to hot because of dust .
After cleaning the problem was solved

yes, thats exactly what happens. and considering this is a poorly vented laptop with known overheating problems that wouldn't surprise me.
The question is, how do I clean it? and why did I never see this problem with windows or other distros. I've run Fedora and crunchbang on here. I think I may have saw something smiler with fedora, but it only happened once.

You can try two thinks .
Turn off the 3 D acceleration .
Turn off the animation
So you ask less from you're graphic card , it will not become so hot

Yeah, I'll give it a try... whats weird thought it that it always seems to crash on a low visual load. It just crashed 10 minutes ago. I had that Software manager open that comes with mint. Not synaptic, the other one and one firefox window. I wasn't moving windows around or anything like that. Aside from that, my laptop is literally a foot and a half away from an 8000 btu window air conditioner.